Posted tagged ‘men and women’

Newsweek : Selfishness isn’t usually the word we use to describe love.
Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. To love is to see myself in you and to wish to celebrate myself with you. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. Love is an act of self-assertion, self-expression and a celebration of being alive.

“The passionate attraction between man and woman that is known as romantic love can generate the most profound ecstasy. It can also generate, when frustrated, unutterable suffering. Yet for all its intensity, the nature of that attachment is little understood. To some, who associate “romantic” with “irrational,” romantic love is a temporary neurosis, an emotional storm, inevitably short-lived, which leaves disillusionment and disenchantment in its wake. To others, romantic love is an ideal that, if never reached, leaves one feeling as though one has somehow missed the secret of life….

“I do not see romantic love as the prerogative of youth. Nor do I see it as some kind of immature ideal, inappropriately adapted from literature, that must crumble in the face of “prac­tical reality.” I do see romantic love as requiring more of us, in terms of our personal evolution and maturity, than we generally appreciate. Indeed. that is one of the central themes of this book.”